A coalition of Microsoft’s European competitors, including IBM, Adobe and Sun, have renewed their attack on Microsoft’s Vista operating system, which is due to be launched to consumers this week. 

Vista is under attack in Europe

The coalition has asked European regulators to make a decision “as fast as possible” about a complaint they filed in February last year where they charged that Microsoft’s Vista operating system will extend Microsoft’s monopoly.

The coalition, calling itself the European Committee for Interoperable Standards (ECIS), is composed of Adobe, IBM, Nokia, Oracle, RealNetworks and Sun, along with smaller players Opera Software and Linspire.

The group’s key concern is that  Microsoft’s markup language XAML, which is bundled with Vista, is positioned to compete with HTML (hypertext markup language). ECIS says that this will result in web sites being developed that work only with Vista.

The group has also criticized Microsoft for bundling its own document creation application, XPS, into Vista (XPS competes with Adobe’s Acrobat) and for supporting its own OOXML document file format, instead of the ODF format, which has been approved by the International Standards Organization.

In 2004 the European Commission found that Microsoft used its market domination to edge RealNetworks out of the audio and video streaming market by ensuring that Windows was incompatible with competing server software.

“Microsoft has clearly chosen to ignore the fundamental principles of the Commission’s March 2004 decision,” said Simon Awde, ECIS chairman.

Microsoft’s initial response was that the ECIS was not saying anything new.

It’s been reported that Microsoft has earlier dismissed ECIS is a front for IBM and other competitors.

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Entry was posted on Saturday, January 27th, 2007 at 9:38 pm under Microsoft, Vista.

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